BOTTICELLI IN THE FIRE to be Presented at Big Secret Theatre
The cast includes Kris Alvarez as Madre Maria, Joel Cochrane as Lorenzo, Christopher Hunt as Savonarola, and more.
By: Chloe Rabinowitz Feb. 12, 2026
From the imagination of Jordan Tannahill, one of Canada's most celebrated playwrights, comes a daring and provocative reimagining of Renaissance Florence that feels urgently of the now. Botticelli in the Fire will run March 4 – 14, 2026 at the Big Secret Theatre in the Werklund Centre.
Botticelli in the Fire reimagines the life of Renaissance painter Sandro Botticelli at a moment when art, religion, politics, and personal desire are violently entangled. As the radical preacher Savonarola rises to power and calls for the destruction of “immoral” art, Botticelli is pulled between his devotion to beauty, his startling love, and a society demanding ideological purity. The play explores how extremism takes hold, how desire becomes dangerous, and how artists survive, or are destroyed, when their work is caught in the crossfire of political upheaval.
This extravagant and dangerous spectacle collapses centuries into a world where artists drive sports cars, text their lovers, and play squash between revolutions. As politics, desire, and ambition collide, one man's devotion to beauty threatens to ignite a cultural and political firestorm.
Set against a society teetering on the edge of collapse, Botticelli in the Fire asks a haunting question: when everything is burning, can art survive the flames?
Under the incisive direction of Clare Preuss, this production delivers a visceral theatrical experience - sensuous, volatile, and unflinchingly contemporary - blurring the line between history and the present moment.
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